Many, many, many moons ago I bought my own domain https://snail.ws/ – .ws as Western Samoa was the only domain where I could get “snail” :) In fact I first acquired that domain in December 2004 when I handcoded my blog on my ISP’s server. As is not unusual for me, I never set it up entirely properly and it functioned primarily as a forwarding address…and has done so for 12 years. Once you got to the destination address, the snail.ws disappeared from the address bar and the current page was shown: in the old days that was on zipworld, and for the last 9 years it has pointed to snailx.wordpress.com.

As far back as 12 December, 2004 I was looking at setting up the domain properly. I revisited that desire 7 years ago on 16 January 2009 and still didn’t quite get round to it. Part of the reason is that I always meant to get my own server through one of the various hosting companies. Many are relatively cheap costing around $100 or so per year. I figured once I had the server, I could set up the domain properly, and have my blog as one of the sections. I explored hosting options on several occasions, found good options and never quite got round to biting the bullet.

I’ve been using wordpress.com as my platform for nearly 9 years and have never paid for an account, existing well enough on the free account. I’ve been very happy sitting here and it’s felt a wee bit rude not paying them for it. I happened to be looking at their account options the other day and it’s only US$99/year to move to a proper account, which would include being able to map my domain properly. I may yet get round to setting up a proper server, but wordpress has clearly been fine for  a long time. It all ended up being very easy:

• paid wordpress US$99 (AUD$136)
• added wordpress’s 3 name servers to my domain on GoDaddy
  • ns1.wordpress.com
  • ns2.wordpress.com
  • ns3.wordpress.com
• set snail.ws as my primary domain on wordpress.com
• wait a couple of hours

I finally have snail.ws properly mapped to my wordpress account…only took 12 years :-)